Senate Threatens to Strip Passports from Tax Resisters

Yesterday, the
U.S. Senate
approved
a
bill, largely concerned with “surface transportation” issues, that
includes a provision that may alarm some tax resisters.

The bill would, as of January first of next
year, authorize the government to revoke or deny passports to people
who owe more than $50,000 in back taxes.

It remains to be seen whether the House of Representatives will include this
provision in their own version of the bill.

A bit more news from the tax resistance movement in Greece:

Some volunteers have started up something that I think they’re calling “το
κίνημα της πατάτας” (“the potato movement”), which hopes to cut out the
middleman and regulators between producers and buyers and grease the wheels of
a freed market. The movement is named from their first big action, which in
two four-hour weekend sweeps managed to distribute about 100 tons of potatoes
in Nevrokopi at prices that undercut the supermarkets yet provided better
prices to the farmers than what they could get from wholesalers.
(Here’s
an English-language story on the movement. And
here is an article in Greek about some of the other forms the movement is taking.)

One movement activist,
Dimitri Sianidis, wrote:
“In a country betrayed by politicians, who have in essence enslaved us to
(mostly) foreign interests, and whose citizens are experiencing a new
‘katochi,’
for nobody-knows how long, the initiative of the potato movement volunteers is
ultimately an act of resistance, and a new ‘no!’ against a system of
servitude and misery for the Greeks which foreign and local interests have
imposed on us.”

Representatives from the potato movement and from various local branches of
the “Δεν Πληρώνω” (“Not Paying!”) tax resistance movement, are holding
a conference
later this month to discuss strategy.

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